It was against this background that Nixon and his chief political advisers gathered in Key Biscayne for a postmortem—one of them, reflecting their host’s fondness for sports cant, called it “going over the game plan.” Mitchell, who was particularly gloomy, said the President had acted as though he had been “running for sheriff.” All agreed that they could not afford a repeat performance two years hence. Starting now, Nixon must appear to be aloof from partisan politics, doing his job as President. The new chairman of the Republican National Committee would be Senator Robert Dole of Kansas, a GOP stalwart and a hard-liner.
But that wasn’t the most important decision at the meeting. As one who was there put it afterward, “We knew we were in a damn tough fight, and we weren’t going to entrust it to a bunch of cautious old hacks down at the committee.” Another said later, “The decision was to get politics the hell out of the White House and across the street”—across the street being the steel and glass tower at 1701 Pennsylvania Avenue, a hundred and fifty yards from the White House. There the independent Citizens Committee for the Reelection of the President opened its second-floor offices in March 1971 amid new furniture, fashionable interior decoration, and deep orange pile carpeting. Until John Mitchell resigned from the Justice Department and took it over, it would be run by a protégé of Haldeman’s, Jeb Stuart Magruder. Magruder’s director of security was to be James W. McCord Jr. His counsel was G. Gordon Liddy. The committee itself was to become known to all, Republicans and Democrats alike, as CREEP.
THIRTY-SIX
The Divided States of America
That winter nostalgia became big business. Wooden cigar store Indians were bringing as much as $4,000 each; Superman comic books issued in 1938, $400. An Italian designer reintroduced the Rita Hayworth look, and his models, showing the shirt dresses and the flaring skirts, strolled to the piped rhythms of swing music. Coeds, reaching even farther back into the past, wore ankle-length turn-of-the-century frocks and steel-rimmed granny glasses. Arrow Shirts were displayed in 1906 layouts; Hertz advertisements featured sepia-toned prints and obsolete Victorian type faces. Hippies wore Mickey Mouse watches. Over three hundred radio stations observed Halloween by rebroadcasting Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds. One of the most remarkable—and profitable—shows on Broadway was a revival of the 1920s No, No, Nanette. In its first week it earned $35,000; tickets went for $25 apiece; “I Want to Be Happy” became a hit again. The choreography was by Busby Berkeley. The star was sixty-year-old Ruby Keeler. When she skipped into her first tap dance to the tune of “Tea for Two,” the opening night audience leaped to its feet to give her a roaring ovation.
Among the extraordinary examples of yesterday’s appeal was the 1971 reissue of Sears, Roebuck’s Catalogue No. 104, for 1897, with new introductions by S. J. Perelman and Richard Rovere. The publishers expected it to be bought only by libraries for reference shelves. Instead it sold 200,000 copies at $14.95. Presently a Nostalgia Book Club opened offices, offering books of old movie ads, collections of pulp magazine stories, and the adventures of Dick Tracy, Little Orphan Annie, and Buck Rogers. Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys mysteries were selling briskly. The Longines Symphonette Recording Society was reaching millions with albums of 1930s songs and radio broadcasts under such titles as Remember the Golden Days of Radio, The Great Vocalists of the Big Band Era, Thanks for the Memory, The Years to Remember, Those Memory Years, and Theme Songs of the Big Band Era, The most ambitious project along these lines was a series of Time-Life albums which re-recorded, in stereo sound, the great swing hits of Glenn Miller, Harry James, Artie Shaw, Tommy Dorsey, Les Brown, Woody Herman, Charlie Barnet, Jimmie Lunceford, Claude Thornhill, Lionel Hampton, and, of course, Benny Goodman.
The message was clear: Americans were yearning for the past because they were fed up with the present. Though 1971 was an eventful year, the character of the events was no improvement over 1970. Later inflation would make that of 1971 seem mild, but at the time it seemed outrageous. In February wholesale prices took their sharpest jump in seventeen years. Overall, the cost of living had risen 25 percent in five years. At the same time, FBI figures indicated that serious crimes had increased 176 percent in the 1960s. During the previous year there had been 5.5 million of them in the United States, and whereas one crime in three had been solved in 1960, the rate now was only one in five. Venereal disease had spread dismayingly. The incidence of gonorrhea had attained the proportions of a nationwide epidemic—with no vaccine to prevent infection.
Change continued to alter the country at a startling pace. The figures from the new census, now becoming available, showed among other things that the flight from U.S. farms in the 1960s had reduced the population living on the land by another 40 percent. Rootlessness was up again; six million Americans now lived in trailers. One useful measure of the shifting patterns in urban life was the growth of shopping centers. The first one had been built outside Portland, Maine, in 1959, and over the next decade retail business in the central city there plunged 71 percent. By the second year of the Nixon administration the nation had more than thirteen thousand shopping centers, with more devastating consequences for the stores of downtown America. Another set of figures with ominous implications—which were unappreciated by the Nixon administration—foretold the energy crisis. Since 1945 the consumption of gasoline in the United States had increased fourfold, and the use of electricity sixfold.
It was a rough year for tradition. Rolls-Royce went into receivership. The Army declared that henceforth married WACs and nurses could have babies and remain in uniform. Capitol Hill was rocked when a Weatherman bomb exploded in a men’s lavatory just below the Senate chamber. The Roman Catholic Church announced that 1,400 parochial schools had closed their doors in the past five years. Look observed National Magazine Week by folding. The Bon Vivant Company, makers of fine soups, collapsed when New Jersey health authorities discovered that what they were selling was botulism; over 1.2 million cans of its vichyssoise had to be destroyed. Radicals won three of four available seats on the Berkeley City Council. The judgment “Thirty dollars or thirty days” was heard for the last time when the Supreme Court ruled that a defendant could not be imprisoned because he was unable to pay a fine.
Campuses were quiet in 1971. The impact of Kent State was obvious. A Playboy survey of student opinion found that only 36 percent said, “I would protest now,” and even they added, “but not violently.” A contributor to the Daily Californian wrote: “The level of life in Berkeley has degenerated. The despair of the junkie pervades much of the community. We sit around smoking dope or drinking or thinking of new stereos… all too many people are just waiting for life rather than living.” John L. Erlich, professor of social work at the University of Michigan, said that “large numbers of students have become discouraged and alienated.” Erlich also noted that “larger numbers are still committed to change,” however. The chief difference was that activists had stopped demonstrating on campus. The zealots, and there were still a lot of them, were now concentrating on Washington. The cause of their loudest clamor—the war—was drearily the same. If 1970 had been the year of Cambodia in Indochina, 1971 was the year of Laos. In addition it marked an end to any lingering illusions that South Vietnam, under President Nguyen Van Thieu, was on its way to becoming a democracy.
***
The Gilbert and Sullivan character of South Vietnam’s 1971 presidential campaign could be traced to the 1967 election. The Thieu-Ky ticket had won then, but because eleven candidates had been running, the winners had carried only 35 percent of the vote. Thieu hadn’t liked that. It still rankled; he felt he had lost face. This time would be different. At his direction the Vietnamese assembly required future nominees who wanted a place on the ballot to secure the signatures of either forty assemblymen or a hundred provincial and municipal councilors. (Under the second option, each councilor’s endorsement must be countersigned by his province chief.)
Thieu had two serious challengers: Ky and the popular G
eneral Duong Van Minh. Ky and Minh reached a gentleman’s agreement: they would stay out of each other’s way. Minh also said that he would withdraw if he suspected electoral fraud. Fraud followed; Thieu’s supreme court threw out Ky’s candidacy on a technicality. Angered, Minh called at the U.S. embassy with proof of other Thieu measures showing that the president was rigging the election, among them written instructions to province chiefs to buy votes, to shift “unfriendly civil servants to other jobs,” and to stuff ballot boxes. Minh then quit the race, explaining that he could not “put up with a disgusting farce that strips away all the people’s hope of a democratic regime and bars reconciliation of the Vietnamese people.”
That left Thieu without opposition, a situation which delighted him but alarmed Washington. After U.S. Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker had protested, the Vietnamese supreme court obligingly reversed itself, ruling that Ky was a valid nominee and that his name could be printed on the ballot. But Ky had pride, too. In addition he suspected that Thieu’s orders to the province chiefs had effectively fixed the race. Thereupon he withdrew, naming the president as “the principal actor in the farce.” The election was held as scheduled, and the principal actor in the farce received 94.3 percent of the vote, the balance representing mutilated ballots. Thieu announced that he was gratified by this “astounding” display of confidence in his leadership, but this was no time for him to be winning Pyrrhic victories. By the end of the year the American troop level there would be down to 158,000, and the ability of his army to stand on its own was in grave doubt.
A South Vietnamese campaign in Laos multiplied the doubts, which was ironic, because it was supposed to do the opposite. To prove the effectiveness of Victimization, 16,000 ARVN troops were ordered to cross the demilitarized zone (DMZ), penetrate Laos along route 9, and cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail, that legendary spiderweb of supply paths which by now was fifty miles wide at some points. Few planners in military history had been so careless of secrecy. For weeks in advance confident U.S. officers in Saigon briefed the press on the Hobson’s choice which lay ahead for the enemy: the North Vietnamese would either have to abandon their Laotian bases or stand and fight, and if they fought they would be annihilated. To advertise the native character of the drive, a billboard was erected on route 9 two hundred yards from the border of Laos, reading NO U.S. PERSONNEL BEYOND THIS POINT. When reporters pointed out that the operation bore an American code name—Dewey Canyon II—the name was hastily changed to Lam Son 719.
Lam Son 719 was launched on February 8, 1971, to the accompaniment of the continuing drumbeat of publicity. The first reports claimed success. War correspondents knew only that the troops were moving slowly against no apparent opposition. An armored column took two weeks to move eleven miles. Then disaster struck. The enemy attacked with tanks, heavy rockets, massed artillery, and four of North Vietnam’s best divisions. In Saigon the deputy U.S. commander, Major General Frederick Weyland, acknowledged that South Vietnam’s losses were “worse than Tet.” Stalled, the battalion commanders of Thieu’s supposedly elite 1st Division asked permission to fall back. They were turned down because, Frances FitzGerald wrote in Fire in the Lake, “The American command and the White House had claimed that the ARVN would stay in Laos and occupy the trail until the end of the dry season in May, and the ranking ARVN officers did not dare contradict the Americans.”
Infantrymen of the 1st Division panicked, abandoned their positions, blew up their artillery, and desperately hacked their way through jungle to clearings where U.S. helicopters could rescue them. Americans watching televised evening newscasts that week saw terrified ARVN soldiers clinging to the helicopters’ skids. Only the intervention of American air power averted total catastrophe. At the end of the forty-five-day campaign the South Vietnamese units had suffered over 50 percent casualties—3,800 killed and 5,200 wounded. Eight battalions were unable to take the field. Traffic on the trail actually increased. When Nixon told the nation in early April, “Tonight I can report that Vietnamization has succeeded,” his critics accused him of insulting the country’s intelligence.
A response from America’s antiwar movement was inevitable. On April 18 the Vietnam Veterans Against the War encamped below Capitol Hill and picketed the Supreme Court. Presidential counsel Charles W. Colson hurriedly organized the Veterans for a Just Peace, and the Reverend Carl McIntire formed another countergroup, the Patriots for Victory, which called on Nixon to jettison his timid Vietnam policy and “use the sword as God intended.” Administration officials accused commentators of exposing their leftist sympathies by failing to give the VJP and the PFV sufficient publicity, but events were moving too fast for both the government and the press. On April 24 a peaceful Washington march was held by some 200,000 protesters. The next week a “People’s Lobby” swarmed over the Hill and into draft headquarters, buttonholing congressmen and Selective Service authorities, and the end of the month brought the climax of the capital demonstrations—the arrival of the “Mayday Tribe,” which invoked the international distress call on behalf of its avowed objective: “stopping the government.”
Just how violent the Tribe’s intentions were later became a matter of some controversy. The leaders pointed out that their symbol had been the image of Mohandas Gandhi. It adorned their pamphlets, posters, buttons, and the cover of their tactical manual, which explained the principle of organized civil disobedience. Yet some of their methods were rougher than Gandhi’s. Techniques included throwing junk in the street, abandoning autos at key intersections, and lying in front of cars. The Washington police force, which was known as one of the most relaxed in the nation, decided to adopt a strategy of killing the protesters with kindness. It was never given a chance to work. The President sent new instructions from San Clemente. He wanted the government to react more aggressively.
As coordinator of law enforcement tactics he chose Attorney General Mitchell. At the time of the November 1969 demonstrations, Mitchell had told his wife Martha that the peace marchers reminded him of Russian revolutionaries. More recently he had argued before a group of attorneys that the government’s right to protect itself must override the right of individuals to privacy. The example he had chosen then was the need, as he saw it, for wiretaps without court orders. The Mayday disorders provided another illustration of the Mitchell approach to law enforcement in a time of political dissent. Under normal procedures, a policeman making an arrest must complete a form, filling in the name of the person charged, the offense, the arresting officer, and the time and place of the alleged infraction. Confronted by an invasion of 12,000 to 15,000 youths, many of them bent upon disrupting Washington traffic, Mitchell decided to cut through what he regarded as red tape.
On the evening of May 1 the vanguard of the Tribe was listening to a rock concert in West Potomac Park, near the Lincoln Memorial, when 750 helmeted officers swinging riot sticks drove them into the streets. Two days later the main battle was joined. Law enforcement officials had been given an overriding mission: keep the traffic flowing. Policemen, National Guardsmen, and regular Army troops broke up large concentrations of demonstrators with tear gas and truncheons. Assault units hovered overhead in military helicopters, ready to pounce. On that first day of the dragnet 7,200 were arrested, many of them peaceful pickets and spectators. It was a record. Altogether 12,614 were taken into custody over a four-day period. The jails wouldn’t hold them; the overflow was penned in an open-air stockade at Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium.
There they sang “God Bless America”—derisively—and “We all live in a con-cen-tra-tion camp,” to the tune of the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine.” Among them was Dr. Spock, shivering in a light raincoat. Abbie Hoffman was arrested in New York and accused of being a Mayday conspirator. He said, “I had about as much to do with the demonstrations in Washington as the Capitol bombing or the earthquake in Los Angeles, which I also expect to be indicted for.” He had been picked up after a scuffle, and his nose was injured and taped. He said, “Like, man, that’s
defacing a national monument.”
Congressional doves were appalled by the demonstrations. Tunney of California told reporters that the “foolish and useless” disorders “might well have ruined several months of hard work by the real advocates of peace.” As it turned out, the courts rejected the arrests as clear violations of the prisoners’ civil rights. The American Civil Liberties Union had anticipated that outcome, but it had been by no means certain at the time. The administration thought the law enforcement officers had performed admirably. Returning from California, Nixon told Republican leaders that he thought the Washington police chief had done “a magnificent job.” He said, “John Mitchell and the Department of Justice did a fine job, too. I hope you will all agree to make that point when you leave here.” Mitchell said, “I am proud of the Washington city police. I am proud that they stopped a repressive mob from robbing the rights of others.” Then he compared the peace demonstrators to Hitler’s Nazi brownshirts.
***
Six weeks after the great Mayday bust the New York Times of Sunday, June 13, carried on its first page the dull head: “VIETNAM ARCHIVE: PENTAGON STUDY TRACES 3 DECADES OF GROWING U.S. INVOLVEMENT.” The story jumped to six inside pages, where column after column of dense type reprinted U.S. communiqués, recommendations, position papers, cables, and presidential orders, all concerning American activity in Indochina. It was perhaps the most extraordinary leak of classified documents in the history of governments, and it was only a beginning. Subsequent installments, the editors promised, would reveal more.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 184
